Serious about learning everything about government contracting? Interested in learning about contracting from a federal contracting officer’s point-of-view? Looking for an opportunity to learn government contracting in a comprehensive and interactive way?

If you answered “yes” to these three questions, then “Mission-Focused Contracting” — a two-week course offered by The Contracting Education Academy at Georgia Tech — is the place to be.

This very comprehensive course is being offered on the Georgia Tech campus over a two-week period, November 7 through 18, 2011. (Please note that there will be no class on Friday, November 11 in observance of Veterans’ Day.)

Mission-Focused Contracting is the capstone course for Level I contracting professionals and all non-contracting personnel who play a role in the acquisition process. This class is applicable to both government and industry purchasing and engages participants in the entire government acquisition process, from meeting with the government customer to completing the contract close-out process. Throughout this course, participants have the opportunity to learn and apply problem-solving and negotiation skills.

The Contracting Education Academy at Georgia Tech (The Academy) is an approved equivalency training provider to the Defense Acquisition University (DAU) and provides continuing education training to acquisition and government contractingprofessionals as well as to business professionals working for government contractors or pursuing opportunities in federal contracting.

Business people taking this course have the unprecedented opportunity to sit side-by-side with government contracting personnel to learn the ins and outs of federal contracting. In addition, many of the principles of federal contracting apply to state and local government procurement.

Senior executives at several Cabinet-level departments received letters Aug. 5 that asked why their small-business advocacy offices have not been given the authority the law dictates.

Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), chairman of the Small Business Committee’s Contracting and Workforce Subcommittee, wants to know why departments’ office of small and disadvantaged business utilization (OSDBU) officials don’t have access to top officials to deal with small-business problems, such as contract bundling and paying firms promptly.

The Small Business Act requires that heads of a department’s OSDBU should “be responsible only to, or report directly to, the head of such agency or to the deputy of such head.”

It’s not happening, according to a Government Accountability Office report from June.

Only nine of the 16 federal agencies that GAO reviewed were in compliance with that part of the Small Business Act. The remaining seven agencies failed to comply with the law. Those agencies’ OSDBU directors reported to lower-level officials or had delegated OSDBU responsibilities to officials who did not meet the reporting requirement, GAO wrote.

Further, these agencies were not in compliance when GAO last examined them in 2003.

In GAO’s latest review, Social Security Administration officials said they fixed the problem. Officials at the Interior Department agreed to re-evaluate their reporting structure.

On the other hand, the Commerce, Justice, State and Treasury departments disagreed with GAO, saying they were in compliance. The Agriculture Department also got a letter because officials delegated the OSDBU director’s authority in a way that was contrary to the law.

Mulvaney wants to know more details about each agencies’ OSDBU, including the assigned functions and budget. He also asked when the OSDBU will actually have access to top officials, in addition to a copy of the new organizational chart. He expects responses by Aug. 31.

The subcommittee is planning a hearing in September to look further into this situation.

It was back on Mar. 16, 2010 that the Georgia Tech Procurement Assistance Center (GTPAC) launched its newly-designed website. It got off to a great start — 392 people visited http://www.gtpac.org 469 times that day, looking at 1,503 pages on the site.

Over the next 365 days, interest has steadily increased. By Mar. 16, 2011, an analysis of the GTPAC website shows that a total of 45,689 visitors made 74,155 visits to the site, viewing our articles and pages 161,322 times.

Visitors to the GTPAC website have come from 141 countries around the world. In the United States, there have been 72,023 visitors — representing all 50 states. Of course, within the U.S., most visits came from within the state of Georgia — 40,616 to be exact.

Outside Georgia, the states from which the most people have visited are (in descending order): Virginia , California, the District of Columbia, Florida, New York, Texas, Maryland, Illinois, Alabama, and North Carolina.

What are GTPAC’s most popular web pages? Other than many of the daily news stories pertaining to developments in the government contracting arena, the pages that are most popular are:

Entrepreneurs are a powerful economic force. They create jobs, grow businesses, and develop the innovations on which America thrives. In order to help entrepreneurs thrive, the White House announced the launch of an initiative called “Start-up America” to celebrate, inspire, and accelerate high-growth
entrepreneurship throughout the nation.

This initiative comes to Georgia Tech on Monday, May 2, 2011. The event is free and open to the public, but advance registration is required.

The “Startup America: Reducing Barriers” event will be held from 1:00 until 4:30 pm on Monday, May 2 at Georgia Tech’s Global Learning Center, located at 84 Fifth Street, NW, Atlanta, GA 30308-1031.

Administration officials will join local high-growth entrepreneurs to discuss the regulatory reforms, reductions and improvements that could be enacted to help high-growth entrepreneurs grow in our country.

This event is free of charge, however pre-event registration is required, and space is limited.

Scheduled to participate are: Marie Johns (Deputy Administrator, US Small Business Administration), Michael Fitzpatrick (Associate Administrator, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs), Teresa Rae (Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Deputy Director of the US Patent and Trademark Office), Ronnie Chatterji (Senior Economist, Council of Economic Advisors) and local leaders.

Newly-published rules by the Small Business Administration (SBA) address the justification and approval process associated with large sole-source contract awards to 8(a) firms; address parity among 8(a), HUBZone, and SDVOSB firms; set a minimum for the amount of work an 8(a) firm must do when joint venturing with a large business; and propose increases in the small business size standards for some industries. Public comment is being solicited on the last item.

Specifically, the rules:

Require federal agencies to issue a Justification and Approval prior to the award of 8(a) sole source contracts over $20 million;

Clarify a contracting officer’s ability to use discretion when determining whether an acquisition will be restricted to small businesses participating in the 8(a), HUBZone or service-disabled veteran-owned small business (SDVOSB) programs;

Quantify the amount of work that an 8(a) firm must perform when joint-venturing with a large business; and

Propose increases in the small business size standards for dozens of service industries in NAICS codes 54 and 81. (The last major size standard changes took place 25 years ago.)

The first two rules were issued as interim rules by the SBA and the Federal Acquisition (FAR) Council, and are effective immediately. The third item is a proposed rule. All were published on March 16, 2011 in the Federal Register.

Here are the details on the rules.

Justification and Approval for 8(a) Sole-Source Awards Above $20M

The FAR Council issued an interim rule implementing Section 811 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 (Pub. L. 111-84), which requires federal agencies to issue a Justification and Approval (J&A) prior to awarding a sole-source contract over $20 million under the 8(a) program. The J&A must be approved by an appropriate official (as currently defined by FAR 6.304) and made public after award of the contract. Prior to the enactment of section 811, a sole-source award of a new contract made using the 8(a) contracting authority did not require a J&A, regardless of the dollar value. Under the interim rule, the J&A must document the reasons for making a sole-source award rather than a competitive award under the 8(a) program. The rule institutes no new requirements for sole-source 8(a) awards less than or equal to $20 million. Here is the full text of the rule: Justification and Approval of Sole-Source 8a Contracts 03.16.2011.

Parity Among 8(a), HUBZone, or SDVOSB Programs

The FAR Council issued an interim rule implementing Section 1347 of the Small Business Jobs Act of 2010 (Pub. L. 111-240) and clarifying that there is parity when a contracting officer selects among small businesses participating in the 8(a), HUBZone and SDVOSB programs. Under the interim rule, contracting officers will have the discretion to determine whether an acquisition will be restricted to one of these three programs. The full text of the rule is available here: Socioeconomic Program Parity 03.16.2011.

This interim rule also clarifies that:

Although there is no order of precedence among the three programs, if a requirement has been accepted by SBA under the 8(a) program, it must remain in the 8(a) program unless SBA agrees to release it;

For acquisitions exceeding the simplified acquisition threshold (that is, contracts more than $150,000), contracting officers must consider a set-aside or sole source award to a small business under the 8(a), HUBZone, or SDVOSB programs before proceeding with a small business set-aside; and

The small business set-aside requirement under FAR 19.502-2(a) does not preclude award of a contract to a participant in the 8(a), HUBZone, or SDVOSB programs. SBA regulations give contracting officers the authority to use these programs at dollar levels above the micro-purchase threshold and at or below the simplified acquisition threshold.

It is important to note that the interim rule does not address SBA’s new Women-Owned Small Business (WOSB) program. The WOSB program will be addressed as a separate interim rule under FAR Case 2010-015 and implement the SBA’s WOSB Federal Contract Program final rule (75 FR 62258, October 7, 2010). The SBA rule provides for parity between WOSBs and other small business contracting programs.

Minimum Amount of Work 8(a) Firms Must Perform in Joint Ventures

To get access to set-aside contracts, large companies can joint venture with 8(a) companies. But SBA rules now say that the 8(a) firm must perform at least 40 percent of the work of each joint venture contract. Previously, the SBA required that the 8(a) company in a joint venture perform a “significant portion” of a contract’s work.

Service Industries – Small Business Size Standards

The SBA issued a proposed rule increasing the small business size standards for 35 industries and one sub-industry in North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) Code 54, Professional, Scientific and Technical Services, and one industry in NAICS Code 81, Other Services. Many of the size standards would increase significantly under the proposed rule. For example, several of the NAICS code 54 size standards will increase from $4.5 million – $7 million, to $14 million – $19 million. It is estimated that SBA’s proposed size changes would let up to 9,450 additional firms be eligible for small-business contract preferences. The full text of the proposed rule is available here: Small Business Size Standards – Proposed – 03.16.2011.

The SBA is accepting public comments on the proposed changes to the small business size standards through May 16, 2011.

For the first time in 13 years, the government has cut its annual spending on federal contracting, Obama administration officials announced on Thursday.

Federal agencies spent $535 billion to purchase private sector goods and services in fiscal 2010, compared to $550 billion in fiscal 2009, according to Jeffrey Zients, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget.

“We have reversed the trend of uncontrollable growth [in federal contracting],” Zients said in a conference call with reporters. “We’re saving money and making sure every taxpayer dollar is being well-spent.”

President Obama previously had called for a combined 7 percent reduction in baseline contract spending in fiscal 2010 and fiscal 2011 for a total savings of $40 billion. The administration says it is on pace to meet those targets, since the goal of the initiative was to reduce the overall rate of procurement spending. If the government had continued at its previous pace of contract spending, it would have spent roughly $615 billion in fiscal 2010, Zients said.

The decline in contracting spending is largely a reflection of agencies buying smarter — and often less from the private sector, said Daniel Gordon, administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy at OMB.

For example, the Veterans Affairs Department has reduced its purchases of new information technology systems while the Justice Department eliminated an expensive case management system. The Housing and Urban Development Department, meanwhile, saved $44 million by eliminating a financial management system.

Several agencies also have focused on consolidating their purchases through strategic sourcing, introduced enhanced competition into their acquisitions and improved their contract management oversight, Gordon said.

“We have made real measurable progress,” he added, “progress that you can measure in dollars.”

The administration, however, is not willing to link the contract savings to its governmentwide insourcing initiative. The effort to bring some contractor functions back in-house, according to Gordon, is focused on the government regaining control of its core operations and less about taxpayer savings.

“We don’t view [insourcing] as a cost saving initiative,” he said. “We view it as a cost management initiative.”

While agencies met their overall goal of spending less on contracting, they failed to hit a series of targets for reducing their expenditures in several high-risk categories. A July 2009 memo from OMB called on agencies to reduce by 10 percent their use of sole-source, cost-reimbursement, and time-and-materials contracts. Gordon acknowledged those targets have not yet been met.

The procurement chief said the percentage of sole source contracts in fiscal 2010 dipped by 6 percent, although the percentage of contracts with only one bid declined by 11 percent.

The administration also made progress in cutting its spending on time-and-materials contracts, which are considered the highest risk to taxpayers because of the potential for escalating costs. It appears, however, that most of those contracts were converted to cost-reimbursement vehicles rather than fixed-price contracts, the administration’s preferred contracting type, Gordon said.

OMB did not immediately provide details on the time-and-materials or cost-reimbursement spending figures in fiscal 2010.

Contract spending, particularly for professional and technical services, is expected to decline further in the coming years. The administration plans to call for a 10 percent reduction on spending in these two categories, which Gordon loosely defined as the work contractors provide in assisting agency acquisition shops.

Zients, who will head up an effort to reorganize federal agencies to eliminate redundancy in government operations, declined to discuss the effort on Thursday, saying it was in its early stages.

The Small Business Administration could look considerably leaner in the coming months if House and Senate lawmakers have their way.

The lead congressional committees in charge of federal small business policy are planning to scale back or eliminate programs within SBA that might no longer be serving their intended purpose.

On Tuesday, Sens. Mary Landrieu, D-La., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, the chairwoman and ranking member respectively of the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, sent letters to SBA Administrator Karen Mills and agency Inspector General Peg Gustafson requesting recommendations for programs that could be targeted for cuts.

“Like the American people, Congress must continue to evaluate and determine what spending is necessary to meet current needs and demands while identifying and eliminating needless spending,” the lawmakers wrote. “Accordingly, we take this responsibility seriously and will dedicate time and effort in this Congress to determine the best path forward.”

The letters ask for a list of programs by Feb. 10 that could be “eliminated or substantially reduced without undermining the SBA’s ability to serve the needs of small business owners.”

The committee is planning to hold a hearing on proposed SBA program cuts sometime in February. Committee spokesman Richard Carbo said the inquiry will be deliberate and focus on programs with a history of underperforming and that are failing to deliver “the most bang for their buck.”

“Sen. Landrieu doesn’t want this to just be a reckless cost-cutting hunt,” Carbo said on Friday. “She wants to really dive deep into why some programs might be underperforming and where there are ways to make efficient cuts that won’t harm small businesses.”

Christopher Averill, a Snowe spokesman, said the senator does not have a list of programs she is looking to eliminate, but rather would focus on programs that are “duplicative or ineffective.”

SBA spokeswoman Hayley Meadvin said the agency will respond in writing to the senators.

The agency also faces additional scrutiny — and an arguably more skeptical audience — from the House Small Business Committee and its new chairman, Rep. Sam Graves, R-Mo.

On Wednesday, the committee adopted its oversight plan by voice vote. The eight-page document outlines a host of small business programs, functions and policies that will face tough oversight from the panel.

The plan also includes a section detailing a dozen small business programs and offices that could face cuts in an effort to reduce the federal deficit. The list includes SBA’s Patriot Express Loan Program, Drug-Free Workplace Program; Office of Policy, and Office of Native American Affairs.

Several SBA policymakers also could be targeted, including regional administrators, advocacy regional advocates and deputy district directors, the report said. The Treasury Department operates two of the programs on the list — the Small Business Lending Fund and the State Small Business Credit Initiative.

The plan stated that programs could be eliminated as a result of their ineffectiveness or their duplication at other agencies.

“The committee will focus particularly on streamlining and reorganizing of the agency’s operations to provide maximum assistance to small business owners,” the report said. “Offices that primarily provide assistance or advice to headquarters staff that do not promote the interests of small businesses or protect the federal government as guarantor of loans will be recommended for cuts or elimination.”

The proposal suggested that employees could be reassigned to “more critical functions at SBA, such as positions as procurement center representatives.”

The committee also plans to hold hearings and to investigate SBA lending and entrepreneurial development programs, burdensome federal regulations, the misuse of small business contracting programs and the cost effectiveness of the Obama administration’s insourcing policies.

Is insourcing dead? Is the era of big systems integrators ruling the roost coming to a close? Will the defense cuts save the economy?

These were some of the dominant themes I heard executives and others talking about at investment bank Raymond James’ 10th Annual Government Services & Technology Summit on Thursday [Jan. 6, 2011].

A variety of public and private companies gave presentations on their strategies. Because three presentations were usually going on simultaneously in different rooms, I couldn’t hear all of them, but the ones I did hear often shared similar themes.

The easy one to explain is the death of insourcing. Several executives and other speakers commented that a year ago insourcing was a big concern, but not so much now as Defense Secretary Robert Gates has publicly admitted that the cost savings he envisioned from moving contractor jobs to government jobs did materialize.

The demographics of the government workforce make widespread insourcing untenable, several speakers said.

Joe Kampf, chairman and CEO of CoVant, a private equity group, had one of the day’s best quips: “Insourcing doesn’t bother me, until they come for my people.”

I think that was a subtle reminder that while insourcing might not be a major impact to the industry as a whole, there will still be pockets of it and when it happens to you, it’s bad, no matter what the macro trend is.

The theme that people came back to repeatedly was this idea that size and bulk are not the measures of success they once were for government contractors.

Brian Gesuale, senior vice president of Raymond James, used two leading companies of the past decade as examples.

In the mid-2000s, CACI International and SRA International both were rewarded with growing market valuations as they grew. But while they have continued to grow larger, both have seen the value of their stock decline, Gesuale said.

“The supersizing strategy is not the strategy going forward,” he said.

Instead, Gesuale and other speakers emphasized the need to build value by focusing in on niche capabilities that are close to the customer’s mission.

“We want to be close to the flagpole of the agency” is how Vangent CEO Mac Curtis described it during his presentation.

In other words, whatever your company sells, you need to be able to tie it directly to supporting the mission of the agency.

“You need to know what you are good at,” said Terry Glasgow, president of NCI Inc., another presenter.

This is particularly important in the current budget environment because as agencies look to reduce costs, they are going to stick with the contractors who know and support their mission the best.

This trend supports smaller and more nimble companies that specialize in a few critical functions and avoid being seen by their customers as a broad-based IT provider, several speakers said.

Looming over much of the talk on Thursday was the economy and the budget and the impact of attempts to rein in government spending, particularly at the Defense Department.

John Hillen, president and CEO, of Global Defense Technology and Systems, gave a convincing argument that this recovery and downsizing of defense is much different than other similar periods in U.S. history.

Unlike the end of World War II or the end of the Cold War, today’s defense spending is much smaller when compared to the federal budget and the Gross Domestic Product.

Defense cuts are not going to “move the needle” on the budget crisis, he said.

Mandatory spending on entitlements and interest payments on the debt are growing too fast for defense cuts to have much of an impact, he said.
“The math just doesn’t work anymore,” he said.

Overall, the mood at the conference was upbeat. Companies are still actively looking at acquisitions. More deals are expected to be made in 2011 as companies shore up capabilities in areas of the budget that are expected to grow.

Spirits also were buoyed by the successful IPOs of the past year by companies such as Global Defense.

The sentiment also seems to be that with Republicans in control of the House there might be more controls on spending than when the Democrats controlled all of Congress. There were several comments about gridlock perhaps being a good thing.

After a decade of booming contract spending, the federal acquisition market is expected to tighten considerably in fiscal 2011, with fewer opportunities for companies to win major awards, according to an industry research group. Technology deals are likely to be among the exceptions.

“The government is doing everything possible to consolidate and spend as little money as possible in this upcoming year,” said Ashley Bergander, manager of federal programs at FedSources, a McLean, Va., research firm.

Much of the drop in contract spending, she said, can be attributed to the Obama administration’s efforts to bring jobs back in house. The Defense Department announced in August that it was cutting its spending on service contractors by 10 percent during each of the next three years. Many of the jobs contractors currently perform will be insourced to federal workers, particularly at the military services, although other tasks could be eliminated altogether, Defense officials said.

“It’s been a big push by the current administration to hire more government workers, especially to complete a lot of services,” Bergander said. “So we are seeing a lot less contracting out there for actual services.”

Earlier this week, FedSources released its annual report detailing the top 50 contract opportunities — based on their size and relative importance for the government — in fiscal 2011, which began on Oct. 1.

With few exceptions, most of the largest upcoming contracts are recompetes of expiring deals, in which agencies are seeking multiple vendors, rather than a single source, to perform the work. The procurements generally will be firm fixed-price, incorporate full-and-open competition and involve more small businesses, Bergander said.

For example, during the first quarter of the fiscal year, the Homeland Security Department is expected to recompete its $22 billion Enterprise Acquisition Gateway for Leading Edge Solutions requirement. The departmentwide contract for information technology services and commodities will be divided into two source selections: one that is unrestricted and another reserved for small businesses.

Homeland Security’s EAGLE contract is expected to be the second-largest award of fiscal 2011, behind the $30 billion Enhanced Army Global Logistics Enterprise contract, also known as EAGLE. The hotly anticipated Army contract is noteworthy in its value and scope, encompassing a range of domestic and international functions, from training and logistical support to financial tracking, software maintenance and project management. Army’s EAGLE will be available to all government agencies and possibly foreign governments.

Agencies also appear to be taking new approaches to issuing follow-on contracts. A separate report released this week by the market research group INPUT found single contracts frequently are broken into multiple-award, indefinite delivery-indefinite quantity efforts and then rolled into larger and expanded programs.

“Procurements are being reconfigured to accommodate new contracting approaches that are designed to increase opportunities for small business and level the playing field for those firms to compete with their peer group,” the INPUT report said. “This trend makes sense as agencies struggle to conduct acquisitions with a growing shortage of contracting personnel and yet strive to award an increasing percentage of contract dollars to small businesses.”

Overall, FedSources expects an increase in the cybersecurity, health information technology and energy markets, with a declining emphasis on major weapons, aircrafts and NASA space programs. INPUT also is forecasting an uptick in emerging technology approaches, such as cloud computing.

“Any expectations industry may have had regarding a shift in focus to social programs under the Obama administration have not yet materialized in major contract opportunities,” INPUT wrote.

INPUT, recently purchased by Deltek, examined the top 20 upcoming contract opportunities in fiscal 2011, accounting for about $140 billion — a nearly $40 billion decrease from fiscal 2010. Most of the major acquisitions are at Defense, because civilian agencies already awarded many high-value contracts last fiscal year, the group said.

Smaller firms also could see a bigger share of the pie as agencies attempt to introduce more competition and finally meet their small business contracting goals, Bergander said.

The Air Force, for example, is expected to award in early fiscal 2011 its second version of the Consolidated Acquisition of Professional Services contract for technical and acquisition management support at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. The $3 billion contract will be awarded exclusively to small businesses.

The Health and Human Services Department, meanwhile, is planning to award its $20 billion CIO-SP3 total small business governmentwide acquisition contract for health and research information technology.

The Small Business Administration finally has started to implement a contracting program for women who own small firms, one decade after Congress first authorized it.

On Monday, SBAfiled a final rule creating the long-awaited procurement program, which focuses on 83 industries in which women are underrepresented in the federal contracting marketplace. Program participants will be eligible for set-aside deals of less than $3 million for most contracts and $5 million for manufacturing. The rule will appear in the Federal Register on Thursday.

“Despite their growth and the fact that women lead some of the strongest and most innovative companies, women-owned firms continue to be underrepresented in the federal contracting marketplace,” SBA Administrator Karen Mills said. “This rule will be a platform for changing that by providing greater opportunities for women-owned small businesses to compete for and win federal contracts.”

The final rule closely mirrors a proposal the Obama administration first floated in March. SBA received more than 1,000 comments on the proposed rule, but ultimately made mostly minor changes.

To be eligible for the program, a firm must be 51 percent owned, controlled and primarily managed by one or more women who are U.S. citizens. The firm also must qualify as “small” in its primary industry.

SBA officials identified the 83 eligible industries based on a combination of the share of contracting dollars awarded to women-owned firms and the share of contracts awarded. This is a departure from the previous rule by the George W. Bush administration, which identified only four industries in which women-owned small businesses were underrepresented, based solely on the share of contracting dollars.

Women-owned small businesses will be allowed to self-certify for the program, or be certified by a third party, such as an industry association. Companies will be required to submit proof of eligibility to an online document repository that SBA will maintain.

To avoid the fraud that has plagued many of the other small business socioeconomic programs, the agency will examine firms’ documentation and seek punitive actions against ineligible businesses that improperly attempt to participate.

Advocates expect the program will help the government reach, for the first time, the federal statutory goal of awarding 5 percent of all contract dollars to women-owned small businesses.

“The shortfall between the contracting dollars awarded to women and the paltry 5 percent goal has been in the range of $5 [billion] to $8 billion annually,” said Margot Dorfman, chief executive officer of the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce. “We are confident that, with this program, the federal government will finally have the tool necessary to bring fair access to contracts for women-owned firms. We look forward to reviewing the final rule — and hopefully, to seeing an end to our legal claim against the SBA.”

The women-owned small business program has gone through a host of delays, rewrites and litigation during the past 10 years.

In 2000, President Clinton signed the Equity in Contracting for Women Act, allowing the government to reserve contracts for women-owned small businesses in industries where females historically were underrepresented.

The program sputtered, however, during the Bush administration. A 2004 Women’s Chamber of Commerce lawsuit forced Bush officials to draft a proposal. But the 2008 plan set off a firestorm of complaints from lawmakers and women’s advocates, who accused SBA of choosing the narrowest methodology for determining underrepresentation. The Obama administration decided last year to scrap existing proposals and draft a new, comprehensive rule.

SBA now has 120 days to implement the program. The agency plans to use that time to educate and train federal contracting officers on the new requirements and to finalize a database of eligible companies. The program should be officially up and running by early February 2011, according to SBA spokeswoman Hayley Matz.